Hi folks,

I've been thinking of how I can improve the ability of my users to

find people's names in a system that has over 30,000 people in it.

I've looked at soundex, and I've considered munging names to remove

spaces, apostrophes, hyphens, etc. The thing about those approaches

is that in order to be efficient, they require pre-processing all of

the names in the system and storing the results, which can then be

queried to find matches.

Unfortunately, that would require modifications to the database,

which I try to avoid due to the downtime they require.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to produce results that include

close matches on last names that doesn't require pre-processing.

I've played with various schemes to assign "weights" to matches based

on the number of matching letters, but they all end up being very

slooooow and also producing too many false positives.

I suppose there are no easy answers, but if anyone has an algorithm

for this kind of thing that they would be willing to share, I'd be grateful.

Thanks.

Ken Dibble

www.stic-cil.org

_______________________________________________

Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com

Subscription Maintenance: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox

OT-free version of this list: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech

Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox

This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/31.FF.16480.FDF3EE85@cdptpa-omsmta02

** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.